


Nicky and the Christmas Pickle

by jauneclair



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Christmas-adjacent, Discussion of Immortality, Gen, POV Nile Freeman, as in I didn't mean to make this about Christmas but I kind of did, cursing, everyone is a little shit, minor discussion of religion, probably a little blasphemous if you're a Puritan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:42:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28275519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jauneclair/pseuds/jauneclair
Summary: "Hey," Nile says, kicking Joe in the shins, "I have a question. A history question."Joe grins wide underneath his beard. "Shoot." He mimes finger guns at her.Nile tilts her head back and groans. There had been an embarrassing 0.02 of a second, very very early on, when she'd had this terrible secret crush on him that had lasted all of a week, before she'd realized that he was literally The Oldest Man in the World and that he acted accordingly.---In which Nile has Big Feelings (some sad) about her first Christmas since becoming immortal, and everyone is a Little Shit (sometimes as a distraction, but also because that's how they...are).
Comments: 10
Kudos: 40
Collections: The Old Guard Gift Exchange 2020





	Nicky and the Christmas Pickle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ongreenergrasses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ongreenergrasses/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy this! I did NOT intend to write a Christmas fic, but after listening to a podcast about the Christmas pickle (a wacky American faux-Old World tradition that was commercially manufactured by One Guy in Spokane sometime in the 70s or 80s) and a certain Bishop/saint, inspiration struck. There is some discussion of religion/immortality/sainthood, but basically on the same level as Andy and Nile's conversation on the plane. Despite this, I think it's fairly areligious.
> 
> Set less than a year post-movie, so no Booker, but I hope there is plenty of other team bonding/dynamic to satisfy you :) Happy holidays!

They've been tracking their mark across Europe and back for weeks when Nile goes to buy stakeout snacks and realizes, from the rack of lonely unsold newspapers, that it's December 24th.

Oh. Her heart contracts, momentarily, in the check-out queue, and then the line moves and she's handing her power bars and Fanta cans across the counter for the cashier to ring up. With still marked slowness Nile counts out euro coins, and when she leaves the shop she has to do a few careful laps around the block before she can _get it together, Freeman_ and head back to the others, because if she does one more lap she's going to be seen, and she doesn't want to blow this job.

She'd have known, of course, if she had her phone, but it's in a special lockbox back at the Rio safehouse. Too risky to bring it along--and she's still talking to Copley, trying to figure out what to do when she inevitably outlives both the soft- and hardware of it, but there's shit on there that she's not about to lose.

Returning to the under-construction office complex they've been squatting in, Nile wonders if they knew and didn't tell her. If they picked this job to distract her--no, it's dragged on longer than Copley anticipated, which will have Andy raging at him the next time they make contact over sat-phone. No, they've probably forgotten themselves, being ancient, all of them, and the only one to whom this holiday could possibly have any meaning is Nicky, and Nile almost laugh-cries when she thinks about how a popcorn bedecked evergreen was probably not part of the Catholic liturgy in the goddamn eleventh century.

It's the first year after the...after. After Afghanistan, Dizzy, Jay, the fight on the plane, Merrick, Booker, everything. There's days when Nile thinks she's handling it pretty well, thinks she's convinced Andy of the same. And then...there are days like today.

It's not really surprising that Joe and Nicky pick up on her touch of melancholy when she returns to their squat, or that they don't comment on the extra time she took. Andy is off doing Andy things--checking out other vantage points, or perhaps really yelling at Copley over a burner--which seems somehow fortuitous. Nile finds it hard to hide from all of them at once, when they're in the same room. Instead, they rip open the bags of crisps and snap off the soda can tabs (Nile once spent a stakeout very precisely saying 'aluminium' in a British accent until Andy had threatened her with dismemberment) and sit cross-legged on cold concrete while Joe peers out of the scope.

Halfway through their meal, shit, this is a meal, and she's never longed more for an MRE and a mess tent, Nicky asks, "Are you feeling alright, Nile?"

Nicky always cares. Always asks, _tenderly._ On days like today...she tries not to resent him for it. Tries not to think about Booker behind her on the shore of the Thames.

"I'm," Nile swallows down a chunk of protein bar and something that feels like the beginnings of a sob, "I'm just--it's Christmas Eve."

"Oh," Nicky says. His eyes go into that soft, distant focus that he and Joe and Andy get sometimes. Then he's looking back at her with grey-eyed intensity. "I'm sorry. We should have realized. This is an important holiday for you, yes?"

Nile wants to _scream._

"Yeah," she says. "The biggest one. I hadn't made it home since my deployment and I'd…been planning on it, this year. So. That sucks."

She lets out a shaky breath and tries to smile. _Fuck. Fuck!_

Before Nicky can say anything else, she adds, "I don't want to talk about. Please--please don't ask."

Don't treat me like a baby, she wants to say, but even with her mind crackling with the static, stuck between the stations of anger born of sadness and just plain sadness, she knows it would be untrue, and hurtful.

Nicky nods once. "Of course, Nile."

He and Joe switch off on the scope while Nile curls up away from them, but she feels Joe shift and sit down beside her, windbreaker crackling, still giving her space. She has a jail-broken iPod that Copley bought her that she listens to music and podcasts on. She queues up something at random, a hidden history-type podcast that's probably for suburban white dads but that isn't too whitewashed but isn't trying so hard to be woke that it's cringey. She knows that Joe and Nicky are probably sharing A Look about her, a hundred thousand words condensed down to the smallest passing glance, and she squeezes her eyes shut. Presses them closed real hard.

She'd had the episodes queued up on an RSS feed before they'd left, and it being the week before Christmas, and this being the podcast that it was, she shouldn't be surprised that of course the episode that comes on is Christmas-themed. She considers throwing the iPod out the window, but Copley did go to a lot of trouble, and then there's this thing that catches her attention…

When she surfaces, forty-ish minutes later Nicky is still on the scope. Nile's jealous of his focus; he probably hasn't moved.

"Hey," Nile says, kicking Joe in the shins, "I have a question. A history question."

Joe grins wide underneath his beard. "Shoot." He mimes finger guns at her.

Nile tilts her head back and groans. There had been an embarrassing 0.02 of a second, very _very_ early on, when she'd had this terrible secret crush on him that had lasted all of a week, before she'd realized that he was literally The Oldest Man in the World and that he acted accordingly.

“So, if we’re all the immortals that have ever existed,” Nile says, “and we know about each other through our dreams, why are there so many stories about people coming back to life that turn out to not be true, like"-- _oh, shit,_ she thinks as Joe’s face goes from something studied to a bit more narrow-eyed, _he thinks I want to talk about Jesus, I don’t even know how to think about Jesus anymore_ \--”like this guy, the Bishop of Myrna, who raised these three kids from the dead after they were pickled by an evil shopkeeper.”

“Pickled? A shopkeeper? Why would he pickle them?”

“We’ll come back to that later,” Nile says, impatient. “Thoughts on immortality and its historical misuses as a literary or religious device thereof, because why not. It’s the day before the probably incorrect historical birthday of a guy who rose from the dead three days after they put him in his tomb, why not? Go.”

“Well,” Joe says as he puts on his Thinking Face: tilting his head to one side and squeezing one eye shut, “I think you’ve landed on a big part of it already: it’s an easy way to make a figure, perhaps one who is already popular, seem larger-than-life.”

“Wait, you both lived in Turkey, right? And the Bishop of Myra, he’s Saint Nicholas, the--”

“--patron saint of children,” Joe finishes, looking up at Nicky, fondly. 

Nile gapes. “Damn, Nicky, are you--?”

“No, no, Saint Nicholas lived many hundreds of years before Joe and I were even born,” Nicky says, quickly, directing a little frown at Joe. “And despite the ill-intents of _some_ people present and not present, I have never been even close to canonized. In the Roman Catholic Church.”

“You’re being weirdly specific.”

Joe opens his mouth and Nicky says, " _Y_ _usuf_ , please.”

“Spill!” Nile tells Joe.

“Later,” Joe mouths at her. Louder, he adds, “My heart would never be able to maintain a beard like that, long term.”

Nicky continues on, resolute, and ignoring the preening way that Joe strokes his beard. “Lots of stories from the lives of different saints can get all wrapped up together. There was only word of mouth, back then. But yes, this seems to be who your modern-day Santa Claus is named after, by way of the Dutch and the Germans, as we call them now.”

Joe muses, “And Santa Claus himself is immortal in a way, isn’t he? Or at least, he exists outside of time, which may be a different thing altogether. You could argue that if you live long enough--perhaps Andromache the Scythian epochs of long--that you would see all of the dressings of one religion transferred to another. And maybe even have started a few yourself.”

“You’re suggesting Andy is like, the ur-text of immortality,” Nile says, which is of course when she returns.

“What are you talking about?” Andy says, offering no explanation for where she’s been. She kicks the heel of Joe’s boots, so that he makes room for her to press her back against the wall behind him and Nile. 

“Nile is telling us a charming Christmas tale about an evil shopkeeper, a bishop, and some pickled children who were dead but then were not,” Nicky says. “No sign of him, boss.”

Andy looks at her, eyebrows raised, and maybe Nile’s feeling a bit defensive since they last time they talked about religion, which was the first day they ever met, because she says right away, “I was listening to this--thing.” She can’t say _podcast_ , because she’d probably need to spend five or ten minutes explaining that. “Radio program. About a newish Christmas tradition that people have made up, and now they’re trying to backdate it, adding in all of this historical stuff to make it seem like some Old World thing.”

“Right, Santa Claus,” Andy says. “I’ve heard of him.”

“No, _not_ Santa Claus. This is a lot more recent. It’s this thing called--shit, you’re going to laugh. The Christmas pickle.”

Andy grins, but does not laugh.

“Ah, the pickled children, I see,” Joe says. He sticks the tip of his tongue between his teeth, but also does not laugh.

“Bastards, all of you,” Nile says. “Except Nicky.”

“Thank you, _cara_.”

Andy grabs a bag of open chips out of Joe’s hands. “Another phallic holiday symbol,” she says, before starting to attack the remainder of its contents with thoughtless crunching. “What a thing to give to children.”

“It’s not a gift,” Nile races to say, apparently now defending the honor of a plastic Christmas ornament that neither she nor any member of her family had ever possessed. “You hang it on your tree and whichever person--kid--finds it first on Christmas morning gets some kind of extra gift.”

“Not really disproving my point,” Andy says, waggling her eyebrows.

“It’s all because of an evil shopkeeper from Anatolia,” Joe says, “which I think is simply a guise for merchant slander.”

“No! Here’s the thing,” Nile says, “there’s another origin story for the Christmas pickle. There’s this other story about a Union soldier in the Civil War who was held prisoner in Andersonville prison. He was starving to death on Christmas Eve, but was saved by some kind and generous”-- here Nile grimaces, to make her thoughts perfectly clear --“Confederate guard, who gave him a pickle to eat out of his own ration.”

There is a pause, then, and looking up from the scope and giving an apologetic little smile, Nicky says,

“Oh, I’m sorry, Nile. But that was me.”

He turns back to his surveillance of the parking garage opposite. 

“ _What?_ ”

Nile turns to Joe and Andy. Their solemn expressions--or rather, _Joe’s_ solemn expression--crack almost instantaneously.

“Oh my God!” she shouts. “Fuck you, Nicky!”

Andy and Joe are practically rolling on the ground in laughter, and then she’s joining in, tears streaming down her cheeks, gasping for air after a few moments.

“The only way that variant of the story is true,” Andy said, “is if Joe was the guard and it was his p--”

“Shut _up,_ Andy!” Nile covered her ears while Andy positively cackled. “That’s it. I officially regret asking. Y’all can forget it.”

“What? I was going to say ‘pickle.’”

“You were _not._ ”

“Okay, okay,” Andy said, but the corner of her mouth still tugged up. 

“Sorry, Nile,” Joe says, “but we aren’t responsible for everything that happens in history, no matter what Copley’s board might have told you. And, personally, I have no regrets about not being part of this particular...one.”

Their rollicking is interrupted when Nicky says, "Boss, we got our guy," and starts packing away the scope.

"Human sacrifice has been a part of many important religious festivals," Andy says. An ambulance whirs by on the street below, the momentary flash of the light painting Andy's grin bright red and bloody. _Yes,_ a usually-suppressed part of Nile's brain thinks, _gotta worship that later._

"Don't let Andy's blasphemy ruin your favorite holiday, Nile," Joe consoles. Nicky's already zipped up the bag with their weapons. Joe slings an arm over Nile's shoulders. “We’ll start a new tradition, and once we’re done, I’ll tell you the story of how we accidentally-on-purpose got Nicky declared a saint in certain obscure but still extant denominations.” 

It’s not Christmas in Chicago. Not all of it feels all that good. In bed that night, much, much later that night, Nile won’t be able to sleep, keyed up from adrenaline, but that’s what she’ll focus on. The success of the hunt. Eating Chinese food on a chilly bench under streetlights while Andy slowly disappears a hazelnut-filled chocolate bar. Joe’s cheeks red from mirth. Nicky’s long-suffering sighs as Joe tells his story, though he still wraps an arm around Joe’s waist when they get up to leave and walk off, the four of them, back into the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> All mistakes are my own. Comments and kudos are welcomed :) If there's something about this fic that doesn't sit right with you and you'd like to bring it to my attention, please leave a comment or send me a DM on tumblr. I'm currently @jaune-clairanteened there.


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